US

A US businessman backed by former CIA and state department officials says he has secured a vast tract of fertile land in south Sudan from the family of a notorious warlord.

Unity state, where Philippe Heilberg, a US businessman, says he has secured a huge tract of arable land, is inaccessible even by south Sudan’s standards. Apart from AK-47 assault rifles, it is deprived of most of the trappings of the modern world.

A privately held US investment firm entered into an agricultural investment with a company controlled by the son of a South Sudanese general.

"Most observers here take the GOM denials at face value, and attribute the whole matter to Daewoo's extreme naivete in having concluded that a permit to look around for land here was anything more than the beginning of a long and still very uncertain process," writes the US embassy in Antananarivo in December 2008

Faced with high land values and falling milk prices at home, a growing number of New Zealand dairy farmers are investing in South America, the United States, eastern Europe and Russia.

As the Caribbean and the rest of the world are still grappling with the global food crisis, Guyana is seeking to sell its vast land and water resources to United States investors as an area suitable for agriculture and aquaculture investment.

Investors are pouring billions into Russian agribusiness—and trying to reverse decades of Soviet mismanagement.

The owners of Multigrain, a leading Brazil-based agricultural commodity business, announced today the company has acquired 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of farmland and related processing operations intended to strengthen its ability to serve customers around the world.

Angola, one of the world's fastest-growing economies, has launched an ambitious plan to exploit both its fertile soils and high global food prices to attract $6bn (€4.3bn, £3.4bn) in agriculture investments over the next five years.

As with timberland, while direct ownership and management (i.e., being a farmer), is a possibility, such a route is similarly fraught with difficulties. One of the most significant of these is the issue of diversification in the farmland itself - especially with a single investment. A well-diversified holding of farmland (row crop, permanent crop, pasture and even timber) will, therefore, not only require a significant investment, but may also involve land holdings in a number of different locations.

The largest land deal in South Sudan to date was negotiated between Nile Trading and Development Inc. (NTD) and Mukaya Payam Cooperative in March 2008. The 49-year land lease of 600,000 hectares allows NTD full rights to exploit all natural resources in the leased land

Les compagnies étrangères cotées dans les bourses européennes achètent activement des terres agricoles en Russie